Live from the Oluvvier

50th birthdays undeniably deserve to be celebrated properly, and last night's 150-minute live relay on BBC2 served as a very proper big birthday bash for the Royal National Theatre.

Most of those still alive who have, over the half century, given greatest service upon the RNT stages were there: many of the famous dead (Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson R., Scofield) were brought back to life through film clips. As the evening galloped along, Caroline and I watched enthralled. Undoubtedly some gobbits worked better than others: the two Stoppard extracts fell flat, compared with a sublimely funny and moving scene from Angels in America, for instance. But it was the French lesson from The History Boys, with its creator Alan Bennett as Hector (a role he never played on stage, so far as I know) that stole the show.

Proper, improper? The good old BBC prefaced its broadcast with a foul language warning: more appropriate would be a foul (fowl?) behaviour warning for Miley Cyrus's recent award ceremony cavorting - but what a great David Attenborough twerk tweak! Unwittingly, old Attenborough, prophetically commenting upon our sad times, may have found himself a new, young audience.

Three of our apple trees must be 50 years old or more: they have fruited this year as if it's a jubilee. I'm off out to climb the ladder and pick more, before the winds blow them all down. This one was photographed at Schofields.

80 and 100

Bobby Furber was my principal when I was articled as a solicitor in 1966. He may not have taught me much law, but he infected me with his enthusiasm for film and particularly music. "You must," he urged me, "buy Janet Baker's Saga records, Schumann and English Songs: only 12/6d each!" She was little known then, but even on my salary of £450 a year, I felt I could afford a gamble of that level: it paid off, and I still have the two 12" vinyls.

Now Dame Janet Baker, Happy 80th Birthday! I used to keep a record of singers and when/where/in what I had heard them. There can't be many in my book with more than the 33 entries I have for "Baker, Janet (m-s)". Over the period of more than a decade, she was a constant star in my progress to acquiring some sort of musical education, seen and heard mainly in London, but also in Birmingham, in Edinburgh, at Glyndebourne... and then (after her premature retirement) at the opening of the Elgar Birthplace Museum, where she made a pretty speech.

Another milestone: I have just added the 100th photograph of a Gloucestershire church to my website: still 400 or more to go though. The 99th was added yesterday, when I tracked down St John's, Pauntley. This must be one of the remotest churches in the county, but is well worth seeking out for its position. I was on my way to a GOGG garden visit: I had hoped Caroline would be able to come too, as the visit was to Schofields, near Newent. I had been there without her last year, and wanted to show her the amazing cacti, but she was ministering to our current Japanese student, Daisuke from Kanagawa.

"Looking, just looking, is all we have to do to see the essential truth," wrote the late lamented Roger Deakin: I am much enjoying reading his Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, lent to me by Chris Hoggett.

Sc(h)ofields

In Saturday's newspaper there was an obituary of Joy Parker, an actor who died last month aged 90. I can't say I remember her, but my eye was caught by the accompanying photograph.

It showed Joy with the better-known Gwen Watford and Mia Farrow: they were in the title roles of Chekhov's Three Sisters - and I do well remember that 1973 production. It took place on the apron stage of Greenwich Theatre, with Charles Dance as the ghastly Solyony: his was not a performance I recall, any more than Joy Parker's Olga, but I haven't forgotten Mia Farrow's doll-like appearance as Irena.

It was a memorable evening also, being the first time Caroline and I went to the theatre together: there was a last-minute party of us, for whom she cooked supper afterwards - in the extremely primitive under-stairs kitchen of her flat in Regent Square.

Joy Parker's chief claim to fame might have been to have been married for 65 years to the same man, another actor: long stage marriages are rare. And her husband? None other than my absolute hero, Paul Scofield. (They had two children, Martin and Sarah.)

These birds were photographed in July at "Schofields", the garden.

Succulent in Newent

The George Hotel in Newent today was amazing value: only £2 for a pint of beer, plus a two-course lunch for £5. How different from pubs in the Cotswolds (hardly 15 miles distant). Though succulent wasn't perhaps the first word that sprang to mind to describe the meal, it fitted well the splendid Yellow Book garden we visited this afternoon.

I hadn't come across the Land Settlement Association before. During the 1930s, 21 estates of smallholdings were created by the Association - with government funding - for unemployed men, some of whom were coal miners. Prophetically, you might now say, the scheme was promoted by those who believed that post-industrial society in the UK meant a permanent “surplus” of men from heavy engineering occupations, shipyard workers and engineers as well as coal miners. The only alternative to long-term unemployment and perhaps social unrest was thought to be a return to the land.

John and his wife Linda came as tenants in the 1970s, growing three-quarters of an acre of tomatoes hydroponically under glass. When the LSA scheme was wound up in 1982, they were able to purchase their holding, subsequently (with retirement) turning it from a market to a pleasure garden.

The result is "Schofields": just a mile from the Newent bypass, but down a narrow lane, it's not open except by appointment, and really only for groups. It was kind of John to spare us two non-experts so much of his time, as he and Linda certainly have full hands: their two and a half acres of woodland, underplanted with hellebore and daffodil, must be best in the Spring, but the three-quarters of an acre round the house was a mass of colour. Best of all, one of the vast tomato houses (1000 square metres) is full of cacti and similar exotica, a mini Eden Centre in West Gloucestershire.